ancarrol /afrojas_proposal_comments

Address the clarity of the proposal by commenting on the following...

Q1. Do you understand what the project is about from reading the proposal?

• A1: Yes, I understand what the project is about based on the information given in the proposal. The draft strengths were that it immediately addressed the issues of online news and journalist accountability and how he seeks to solve such. One weakness of the draft is that is doesn't state exactly how the tracking visualization would look, be like to interact with, be accessed. "These visualizations should represent the changes made and leave it up to the users to interpret what those tendencies mean..."

Q2. Is the narrative of the project clear?

• A2: Yes. The main narrative and theme of the project is clear. However, the details on how this will be implemented are somewhat scattered.

Q3.Has the author given you a sense of how he/she came to this concept?

• A3: Somewhat. It seems that the author came to this concept as a result of a concern for the issues of unnoted changes between major online news distributors, and the lack of accountability towards those journalists.

Q4. Has he/she positioned or contextualized it in relation to the concerns it addresses?In relation to other "works" that address similar concerns?

• A4: Yes.Andreas has contextualized his project in relation to the concerns it addresses, ie. online news discrepancies and void journalist penance.

Q5. Do you understand who the audience is?

• A5: The idea of audience can only be assumed and is broken into two large clumps. The first is narrow and seems to be associated with educated, upper classes, though such is not specifically defined._"The target group then is all those who have enough computer & political savvy to interact with this project and are curious enough to have questions about the media they consume"_ The second group is everybody else, "more people: those who have perhaps never considered the impact of news source"

Q6. Can you answer the question of why?- Why the artist proposed the project? Why the project is of value to its audience or why an audience would appreciate or participate in this project?

• A6: Yes. It seems, though never specifically stated as a concern directly affecting the artist, that he proposed the project as a result concern due to the lack of tracking activity of edited major online news. The artist briefly states the benefits of writing such a tracking software for consuming audiences.

Q7. Can you say based on the proposal why the project is of value to its audience or why an audience would appreciate or participate in this project?

• A7: Yes. Though the benefits of the project are briefly stated and could be stated in more detail, they are still noted within this draft.

Q8.Based on the proposal how will the artist implement the project? What technologies will be used and/or developed?

• A8: No. I can not tell from the proposal how the artist will implement the project, nor can I tell what technologies will be used and/or developed. He does briefly describe that he will write a program that would crawl the websites (major online news sources) and note the changes in a visual way. I assume that in order to complete the project the artist will have/have access to some form of programming software, visual software, computer and network access.

Q9.ABSTRACT-Could I describe this project based on reading this proposal?

• A9: In this project, Andreas hopes to create a software that will track the editing that occurs within major online news distributors. The software will function by crawling these news sources and noting in some visual way each time a change occurs between them. In doing so he hopes to answer several questions. Do the changes within online news sources occur as a result of each other? If there are common trends between these news sources, will that cause journalists/news distributors to take more responsibility with the information they project as factual and change their coverage methods? Will a community of "media watchers" be created. The artist also wonders how the creation of this software will effect anyone who interacts with the softwares opinions of the online news sources and be a catalyst for the ways in which they interact with everyday decision making.